A maximal domain of preferences for strategy-proof,efficient, and simple rules in the division problem

The division problem consists of allocating an amount M of a perfectly divisible good among a group of n agents. Sprumont (1991) showed that if agents have single-peaked preferences over their shares, the uniform rule is the unique strategy-proof, efficient, and anonymous rule. Ching and Serizawa (1998) extended this result by showing that the set of single-plateaued preferences is the largest domain, for all possible values of M, admitting a rule (the extended uniform rule) satisfying strategy-proofness, efficiency and symmetry. We identify, for each M and n, a maximal domain of preferences under which the extended uniform rule also satisfies the properties of strategy-proofness, efficiency, tops-onlyness, and continuity. These domains (called partially single-plateaued) are strictly larger than the set of single-plateaued preferences. However, their intersection, when M varies from zero to infinity, coincides with the set of single-plateaued preferences.An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title A maximal domain of preferences for tops-only rules in the division problem. We are grateful to an associate editor of this journal for comments that helped to improve the presentation of the paper and to Matt Jackson for suggesting us the interest of identifying a maximal domain of preferences for tops-only rules. We are also grateful to Dolors Berga, Flip Klijn, Howard Petith, and a referee for helpful comments. The work of Alejandro Neme is partially supported by Research Grant 319502 from the Universidad Nacional de San Luis. The work of Jordi Massó is partially supported by Research Grants BEC2002-02130 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and 2001SGR-00162 from the Generalitat de Catalunya, and by the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA from the Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper was partially written while Alejandro Neme was visiting the UAB unde r a sabbatical fellowship from the Generalitat de Catalunya.     

Strategic requirements with indifference: single-peaked versus single-plateaued preferences

We concentrate on the problem of the provision of one pure public good whenever agents that form the society have either single-plateaued preferences or single-peaked preferences over the set of alternatives. We are interested in comparing the relationships between different nonmanipulability notions under these two domains. On the single-peaked domain, under strategy-proofness, non-bossiness is equivalent to convexity of the range. Thus, minmax rules are the only strategy-proof non-bossy rules. On the single-plateaued domain, only constant rules are non-bossy or Maskin monotonic; but strategy-proofness and weak non-bossiness are equivalent to weak Maskin monotonicity. Moreover, strategy-proofness and plateau-invariance guarantee convexity of the range. We thank Salvador Barberà, Matthew Jackson, Bettina Klaus, Jordi Massó, John Weymark, and two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank the participants in the 3rd Workshop on Social Decisions that took place in Málaga in November 2007. Dolors Berga acknowledges the financial support by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through Research Grants SEJ2004-03276 and SEJ2007-60671 and also by the Generalitat de Catalunya through Research Grant 2005SGR-213 and the Barcelona Economics Program (CREA). Bernardo Moreno gratefully acknowledges financial support from Junta de Andalucía through grant SEJ522 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through grant SEC2005-04805.     

Scoring rules on dichotomous preferences

In this paper, we study individual incentives to report preferences truthfully for the special case when individuals have dichotomous preferences on the set of alternatives and preferences are aggregated in form of scoring rules. In particular, we show that (a) the Borda Count coincides with Approval Voting, (b) the Borda Count is the only strategy-proof scoring rule, and (c) if the size of the electorate is greater than three, then the dichotomous preference domain is the unique maximal rich domain under which the Borda Count is strategy-proof. I thank Jordi Massó for his supervision and his never-ending encouragement. Miguel-ángel Ballester showed me how to improve on earlier drafts of the paper. Salvador Barberà, Carmen Bevía, Bhaskar Dutta, Lars Ehlers, Alejandro Neme, Shmuel Nitzan and Yves Sprumont helped me a lot with their comments. All remaining errors are mine. This research was undertaken with support from the fellowship 2001FI 00451 of the Generalitat de Catalunya and from the research grant BEC2002-02130 of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain while I have been a graduate student at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.     

Strategy-proof voting schemes with continuous preferences

We prove that all nondictatorial voting schemes whose range has more than two alternatives will be manipulable, when their domain is restricted to the set of all continuous preferences over alternatives. Our result neither implies nor is implied by the original Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, except if the number of alternatives is finite, when they coincide. A new, direct line of reasoning is used in the proof. It is presented in an introductory section, which may be useful in classroom situations.The work of S. Barberà is partially supported by Research Grant PB 86-0613, from the Dirección General de la Investigación Científica y Técnica, Spanish Ministry of Education.     

Choosing the level of a public good when agents have an outside option

The work examines strategy-proof social choice functions which select a level or the location of a public good when its consumption is not compulsory. We assume that agents have single-peaked preferences on the consumption of the public good as well as a reservation utility. Agents opt out of the good whenever they get a utility smaller than their reservation utility. We characterize strategy-proof and efficient social choice functions as well as the ones which are anonymous and group strategy-proof. Finally, we observe that for given preferences a Condorcet winner may not exist.This article constitutes the first chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I wish to thank especially Jordi Massó for supervising my research, Dolors Berga and Matthew Jackson. I also thank José Alcalde, Salvador Barberà, Carmen Beviá, Jeremy Heald, Hervé Moulin, Antonio Romero-Medina and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions. The European Commission is gratefully acknowledged for its financial support through the T.M.R. fellowship ERBFMICT960619.     

Candidate Stability and Voting Correspondences

We extend the analysis of Dutta et al. (in Econometrica, 69:1013–1038, 2001) on strategic candidacy to multivalued environments. For each agenda and each profile of voters’ preferences over running candidates, a voting correspondence selects set of running candidates. A voting correspondence is candidate stable if no candidate ever has an incentive to withdraw her candidacy when all other potential candidates run for office. In the multivalued framework, candidates’ incentives to withdraw depend on candidates’ preferences over sets. If candidates cannot vote and they compare sets of candidates according to their expected utility conditional on some prior probability assessment, then a voting correspondence satisfies candidate stability and unanimity if and only if it is dictatorial. If the probability assessments are restricted to be uniform, candidates’ preferences over sets are consistent with leximin preferences, or candidates can vote, then possibility results are obtained.This paper is a revised version of the second chapter of my Ph.D. Dissertation submitted to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I am indebted to my supervisor Salvador Barberà for his advice, encouragement, and patience. I thank the hospitality of the Wallis Institute of Political Economy at the University of Rochester, where the revision of this paper was conducted. I am grateful to two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor, John Weymark, for their exhaustive and insightful comments. I also thank Dolors Berga, Carmen Beviá, Walter Bossert, Jernej Čopič, Bhaskar Dutta, Matt Jackson, Jordi Massó, Diego Moreno, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Yves Sprumont for helpful conversations and suggestions. Financial support through Research Grant 1998FI00022 from Comissionat per Universitats i Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya, Research Project PB98-870 from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Fundación Barrié de la Maza, and Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

The lexicographic egalitarian solution on economic environments

This paper considers solutions to distribution problems defined on economic environments. It shows that there is a unique resource-egalitarian and symmetric solution that proposes always Pareto optimal allocations and satisfies Inidivual Restricted Monotonicity; this property requires the poor people of the society to be strictly better-off when social resources increase and the initial outcome is a welfare unequal position. That unique solution is the lexicographic extension of the maxmin criterion.I wish to express my gratitude to Salvador Barberá. I am also very grateful to Hervé Moulin for his encouragement and to Carmen Herrero, Iñigo Iturbe and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. I thank very specially the valuable reading of John Roemer and illuminating conversations with Serge Christophe Kolm. Financial support from Gobierno de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged     

Nonmanipulable voting schemes when participants' interests are partially decomposable

Recent papers by Barberá and Peleg and by Zhou have established that the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem remains valid when individuals are restricted to reporting only reasonable preferences. We present a theorem that covers situations in which, as in Barberá-and-Peleg and Zhou, preferences may be restricted to reasonable ones, but in which, additionally, it may be known in advance that some dimensions of the social decision do not affect all the participants — i.e., in which the social decisions are partially decomposable into decisions that affect only subsets of the participants. As in the previous theorems, the conclusion of this new theorem is that nonmanipulable voting schemes must be dictatorial.An early version of this paper was delevered at the 1989 NBER-NSF Conference on Decentralization at Cal Tech; comments by the conference participants are appreciated, as are comments by James Schmitz.     

From the new left to the new enlightenment: the methodological implications of public attention on private lives

Research on Rajneeshpuram was partially supported by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and a Summer Research Grant from University of Oregon. Research on the fate of Santa Barbara activists was partially supported by grants from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the Graduate Division of the University of California at Santa Barbara.     

Personality and the enactment of emotion

The meaning of personality traits for social interaction was investigated by exploring the personality correlates of abilities to pose emotions. This framework focuses on individual differences in socio-emotional skills. Thirty one males and 37 females were videotaped while attempting to communicate seven basic emotions nonverbally (i.e., using standard content communications), and sending success was measured by showing edited videotapes to judges. Hypothesized relationships between acting ability and scores on the Jackson Personality Research Form and the Eysenck Personality Inventory were then examined. The findings were seen to have implications for predicting individual strengths and weaknesses in social interaction as a function of certain personality traits and for understanding person perception.This research was supported in part by NIMH Grant #RO3MH31453 and Intramural Research Grants from UC Riverside to Howard Friedman, and indirectly by the Biomedical Research Support Program of NIH (#RR077010-11). We would like to thank Louise M. Prince for her assistance.     

The impact of the family on home-based work

This article reports on a study of 899 families with at least one member engaged in home-based work. Six work characteristics are examined in relation to family structure and gender of the home-based worker: business ownership, occupation of the home-based work, amount of income generated, location of the work space, number of hours worked, and availability of help with the work. Women in single-parent and full-nest families are found to do the most restructuring of work time and space and women home-based workers generate less income from the work than do men. Male home-based workers experience less conflict between family and work scheduling, are more likely to have an exclusive work space, and tend to have help with the home-based work.This article reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167, entitled, At-Home Income Generation: Impact on Management, Productivity and Stability in Rural and Urban Families, partially supported by Cooperative States Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Experiment Stations at the University of Hawaii, Iowa State University, Lincoln University (Missouri), Michigan State University, Cornell University (New York), The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University and University of Vermont.Her research interests include divorce, work and family, and the economic well-being of women and children. She received her Ph.D. from Oregon State University.He has extensive experience in research, consulting, and training for small business owners and operators, including single parents, disabled veterans, Hispanics, rural and home-based. He received his Ph.D. from New York University.     

The unique nature of textile and craft home-based workers: A comparison

Using data collected by a nine-state regional research project, textile and craft home-based workers are compared with the rest of the home-based workers in the sample on several selected variables: home-based work and worker characteristics, income, adaptive behaviors to hectic work times, and advantages and disadvantages of home-based work. Significantly more females than males are engaged in textile and craft home-based work. The findings are related to gender; compared with other workers, textile and craft workers spend fewer hours on home-based work, have lower gross business incomes but greater gross family incomes, have more spouses employed outside the home, and are more likely to use personal time than to hire help during hectic work times. Additional research should investigate gender effects and their relationship to the choice and context of home-based work as well as their impact on the household.This article reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167, entitled,At-Home Income Generation: Impact on Management, Productivity and Stability in Rural and Urban Families, partially supported by Cooperative States Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Experiment Stations at the University of Hawaii, Iowa State University, Lincoln University (Missouri), Michigan State University, Cornell University (New York), The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University, and University of Vermont. The authors are listed alphabetically and have contributed equally to this publication.Her research interests include home-based work, social aspects of clothing, and consumer purchase behavior.Her research interests include farm family financial management, home-based work, and housing expenditures.     

Satisfaction with home-based employment

Using data from nine state regional research project on at-home income generation, the relationships of three satisfaction variables to demographic and work situation variables of 899 household managers in households with home-based employment are investigated. The satisfaction variables include quality of life, family income, and control over everyday life. The majority of households are satisfied with their quality of life and control over life although only moderately satisfied with income. One variable is related to the three satisfaction variables, the wage earner's control over the amount of work done in a day.This paper reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167, entitled, At-Home Income Generation: Impact on Management, Productivity and Stability in Rural and Urban Families, partially supported by Cooperative States Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Experiment Stations at the University of Hawaii, Iowa State University, Lincoln University (Missouri), Michigan State University, Cornell University (New York), The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University, and the University of Vermont. This article was accepted in 1992 under the editorship of Charles B. Hennon.Her research interests include evaluation of teaching/learning, program evaluation, and entrepreneurship. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.     

Assessing success and decisiveness in voting situations

In this paper we propose a simple model for measuring success or decisiveness in voting situations. For an assessment of these features two inputs are claimed to be necessary: the voting rule and the voters behavior. The voting rule specifies when a proposal is to be accepted or rejected depending on the resulting vote configuration. Voting behavior is summarized by a distribution of probability over the vote configurations. This basic model provides a clear common conceptual basis for reinterpreting different power indices and some related game theoretic notions coherently from a unified point of view.The authors would like to thank to M. Braham, M. Machover, N. Megiddo and F. Steffen, for their comments, and to J. F. Mertens for pointing out a misstatement, in all cases referring to previous versions of this paper. This research has been supported by the DGES of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under project PB96-0247, by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under project BEC2000-0875, and by the Universidad del País Vasco under project UPV/EHU00031.321-HA-7918/2000. The first author also acknowledges the financial support from a postdoctoral grant from the Basque Government (2000–2001) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal Program.     

Mothers and children alone: The stamp of poverty

The contributions from a variety of potential sources of emotional and economic support are evaluated as well as their impact on female-headed households in a university community. A qualitative, in-depth interview investigation of 36 single mothers is summarized; illustrative quotations and marginal tabulations are provided.The single mothers considered in this study report great difficulty in balancing their own needs for a social life with the needs of their children. These low-income mothers are well educated; their life situations can only be described by the word struggle. Same-sex friends offer considerable support, but economic and child care needs stand out strongly as needs that are often unmet. Their dependency on the welfare system is determined to be an interim need. Mothers in this sample were trying to find work, go to school, and parent while maintaining some social life for themselves and for their children. Coping strategies are discussed, as are the strengths of mother-headed families.Barbara Goldfarb is a social worker at Victim Services Agency, New York, New York, and Roger W. Libby is a professor at the Center for the Family, Division of Home Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. A University of Massachusetts Faculty Research Grant to Roger W. Libby supported this study.     

KNOWING TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHERS: MODERATORS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EAVESDROPPING AND RAPPORT IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

This study examined the association between a partners ability to eavesdrop on nonverbal cues and an actors feelings of rapport during interaction, as well as neuroticism and self-monitoring as moderators of this effect. Eavesdropping ability was defined as lower sensitivity to cues of the face, a source of overtly displayed emotions, relative to sensitivity to cues of the body, a source of leakage of covert or hidden emotions. Results showed that actors felt less rapport the higher their partners eavesdropping. High neuroticism actors were especially likely to feel worse about their interaction and themselves when their partners were good at eavesdropping. In both instances, the eavesdroppers nonverbal behavior seems to have mediated the associations to a small degree.Both authors contributed equally to this paper. This research was supported by a Mary Switzer Research Fellowship to Tickle-Degnen from the National Institutes of Disability and Rehabilitation Research of the US Department of Education, a Sargent College of Boston University Accelerated Research Grant, and funding from the American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc., the American Occupational Therapy Foundation, and Boston University through the Neurobehavioral Rehabilitation Research Center for Scholarship and Research.     

Characteristics and practices of home-based workers

Using data collected by a nine-state regional research project, cluster analysis generates nine clusters of home-based workers from 853 usable cases. The clusters are named for their distinguishing characteristics as follows: Employed Outside the Home; Low Intrusion; Female Wage Workers; See Clients at Home; Lack of Health Insurance; Female Business Owners; Isolated; Two-earner Households; and Male One-earner Households. Ninety percent of the home-based workers are covered by health insurance, 44% are covered through another job. Female home-based workers comprise 41% of the total sample and earn net home-based work incomes below the sample mean. The clusters with the highest net income are predominately male and in marketing/sales, mechanical/transportation, and contractor occupational categories. Recommendations for prospective home-based workers are made.This article reports results from the Cooperative Regional Research Project, NE-167, entitled, At-Home Income Generation: Impact on Management, Productivity and Stability in Rural/Urban Families, partially supported by the Cooperative States Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Experiment Stations at the University of Hawaii, Iowa State University, Lincoln University (Missouri), Michigan State University, Cornell University (New York), The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University, and the University of Vermont. Authors are listed alphabetically and have contributed equally to this publication.Her research interests include home-based work, social aspects of clothing, and consumer purchase behavior.Her research interests include farm family financial management, home-based work, and housing expenditures.     

Monotonicity in Condorcet Jury Theorem

Consider a committee of experts dealing with dichotomous choice problem, where the correctness probabilities are all greater than We prove that, if a random subcommittee of odd size m is selected randomly, and entrusted to make a decision by majority vote, its probability of deciding correctly increases with m. This includes a result of Ben-Yashar and Paroush (2000), who proved that a random subcommittee of size m3 is preferable to a random single expert.Research supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant\#186/01)     

Extending an order to the power set: The Leximax Criterion

This work analyzes the issue of ranking the levels of well-being enjoyed by an agent when dealing with her opportunity set in a freedom of choice context. We try to propose a natural extension of a preference relation over a (possibly) infinite set X to its power set, compatible with the finite Leximax criterion. This research has been supported by Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología, SEC2000-0838 (Ballester), and Dirección General de Enseñanza Superior e Investigación Científica, PB98-0551 (De Miguel).